There appears to be no published knowledge regarding how humans use unit conversions. Until very recently, acquiring such data would be essentially impossible, but mobile devices have now enabled many questions to be answered through passive "crowdsourcing" of big data sets. This work details the analysis of five years of anonymous user…

The lack of a definition of the T in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) acronym is pervasive, and it is often the teachers of STEM disciplines who inherit the task of defining the role of technology within their K-12 classrooms. These definitions often vary significantly, and they have profound implications for curricular and…

In the USA, the Common Core Standards in Mathematics for the early grades (K-3) are designed to build on and develop students' number sense as students gain understanding of the structures of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is well understood in teaching circles that subtraction is notoriously more difficult for students…

An Australian longitudinal study of 319 Kindergartners developed, implemented and evaluated an intervention, the Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Program (PASMAP). It comprised of repetitions and growing patterns, structured counting and grouping, grids and shapes, partitioning, additive and multiplicative structures, measurement and…

We argue that understanding the cognitive foundations of computational thinking will assist educators to improve children's learning in computing. We explain the conceptual relationship between executive functions and aspects of computational thinking. We present initial empirical data from 23 eleven year old learners which investigates the…

Bayesian statistics has gained great momentum since the computational developments of the 1990s. Gradually, advances in Bayesian methodology and software have made Bayesian techniques much more accessible to applied statisticians and, in turn, have potentially transformed Bayesian education at the undergraduate level. This article provides an…

The Thunkable online platform is an easy-to-use resource for creating apps for mobile devices. Computational thinking is at the heart of problem solving in computer science, and research suggests students' computational thinking improves when they use simple block coding systems similar to the format used for Thunkable.

An educational team founded by Seymour Papert at MIT has developed an evolving series of computing environments designed to facilitate computational thinking. Papert outlined the goal of developing educational environments to facilitate the use of computer as a computational object in a seminal publication, "Teaching Children Thinking"…

This study aims to investigate problem-solving with dataset (PSWD) as a computational thinking learning implementation as reflected in academic publications. Specifically, the purpose is to specify the scope of PSWD, which overlaps with the data literacy, thinking with data, big data literacy, and data-based thinking concepts in the literature.…

In a paper (posthumously) co-authored by Isaac Newton himself, the primacy of geometric notions in pedagogical expositions of centripetal acceleration has been clearly asserted. In the present paper we demonstrate how this pedagogical prerogative can inform the design of an experiment involving an accelerometer-equipped smartphone rotating…

This article describes an activity appropriate for middle or high school physics or physical science students. Rather than giving the answer to the question "How does a milliliter compare to a cubic centimeter?" the students develop a procedure for measuring volume by calculation and by displacement of water. Students share the data and…

Researchers are often inclined to test agreement or discrepancy hypotheses using difference scores. This commentary explains 2 mathematical-statistical principles underlying associations with difference scores and 2 conceptual-interpretation problems that make difference scores inappropriate for testing such hypotheses. The commentary provides…

The residual gain score has been of historical interest, and its percentile rank has been of interest more recently given its close correspondence to the popular Student Growth Percentile. However, these estimators suffer from low accuracy and systematic bias (bias conditional on prior latent achievement). This article explores three…

We examined the effect of estimation methods, maximum likelihood (ML), unweighted least squares (ULS), and diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS), on three population SEM (structural equation modeling) fit indices: the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), the comparative fit index (CFI), and the standardized root mean square residual…

This study investigated the role of using unplugged computing activities on developing computational thinking (CT) skills of 6th-grade students. The unplugged computing classroom activities were based on the Bebras challenge, an international contest that aims to promote CT and informatics among school students of all ages. Participants of the…